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About Camille Paglia
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Sexpert Opinion From Niagara to Viagra Right On! Lovers and Writers Ask Camille Under the Covers Second Thoughts American Squirm Unzipped |
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Dear Camille:
What's your response to Sen. Majority Leader Trent Lott's recent characterization of homosexuality as a disease, akin to kleptomania? Does the boundary between church and state grow thinner in the U.S. as these Southern Baptist politicians take over the nation's capital?
-- Scared and secular
Dear Scared:
The separation of church and state that religious refugees like the
17th century Puritans sought here has to do only with the
"establishment" of religion, that is the official endorsement by government of
a particular sect. In England after the Reformation, for example, when the
heir-hungry Henry VIII broke with Roman Catholicism over the issue of divorce,
the British sovereign thenceforth became the head of the Church of England.
Sectarianism was so interconnected with public policy that even matriculation
at Oxford and Cambridge Universities required formal assent to the "39
Articles" of the Anglican faith -- which is how one of my heroes, the radical
poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, got expelled from Oxford in 1811 for publishing a
pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism."
Our Declaration of Independence, which explicitly invokes "Nature's God," the
"Creator" and "Divine Providence" (influenced by Enlightenment deism),
clearly shows that the founders of this nation expected that religious faith
would continue to play a role in political life, even if religious
tolerance -- that is, an end to religious persecution -- would be the rule.
For gays to demand that sincere Christians cease lobbying Washington about the
increasing liberal drift of government policy shows colossal historical
amnesia. For pity's sake, it was the flamboyant, thunderous activism of
evangelical Protestant ministers in the 19th century that powered the
abolitionist movement and led to the end of slavery in the United States. (Of
course, these massively documented facts were concealed in Steven Spielberg's
Liberal Hollywood Lite version of "Amistad.")
Abolitionist ideas, traceable to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, came to America from
England via the Quakers in the late 18th century. It was thanks to the
Quakers' religious presence in Pennsylvania that Philadelphia became the
birthplace of the first Anti-Slavery Society. Within five years of its
founding in 1833, there were more than 1,350 such organizations in the United States.
Similarly, eloquent Protestant ministers like Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse
Jackson have been central to the modern Civil Rights Movement, which secured
voting rights for African-Americans and opened the way to the election of a
rising number of black politicians at the local, state and federal levels.
So gays should quit bitching about Southern Baptists exercising their
constitutional right to free speech about homosexuality, which is indeed
condemned by the Bible, despite the tortuous casuistry of so many self-interested parties, including clerics. I have been warning and warning for
years that the insulting disrespect shown by gay activists to religion -- which
has been going on for 20 years virtually unchecked on TV talk shows, with
their biased liberal hosts -- would produce a backlash over time.
Gay men must never get complacent, for they are forever on the edge of a
precipice: In a political cataclysm, they have usually been among the first
to be purged. No major world religion has
ever endorsed homosexuality, which can be openly practiced only in peaceful,
affluent, cosmopolitan periods. But history
shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with
urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward
decadence. In my interpretation, total sexual freedom allows humanity's
repressed animality to go wild.
As a libertarian, I believe that government must stay out of our private
lives. As an atheist, I believe that government has no business sanctifying
the unions of some persons (heterosexuals) but not others (homosexuals),
particularly when certain benefits (such as employer-sponsored spousal health-insurance) flow to one group only.
As a scholar, however, I am troubled by the provincialism and amorality of the
gay male world, when compared to the vastness of philosophical perspective
provided by orthodox religion -- or even by ancient paganism, which honored
nature. And as a lesbian, I'm sick and tired of the gay rights movement being
damaged by the cowardly incapacity for self-examination of many gay men.
Last week, when I received your question and was pondering a response, two
television programs showed the enormous dilemma still faced by gays. First
was a depressing face-off about Trent Lott's statement on CNN's "The Larry King
Show" between Gary Bauer, head of
the conservative Family Research Council, and openly gay Rep. Barney
Frank of Massachusetts.
It would be difficult to say which of the two guests was more physically
repellent as a specimen of alleged manhood: the creepy, desiccated, squirrely
Bauer or the nasty, whiny Frank, with his puny infant's mouth still squalling
for mama's bottle. How bizarre it was to watch homosexuality being
acrimoniously debated by two asexual blobs who are still licking their wounds
from getting squashed and scorned by all the guys and dolls in the schoolyard.
After the usual, unilluminating repetition of entrenched positions -- with the
asinine Frank constantly interrupting and snorting derisively and the pallid,
pop-eyed Bauer doggedly enunciating the traditional Christian view (to which
gay activism has never yet adequately responded) -- the show ended without
changing anyone's mind. When will the national gay leadership realize that
Frank, whatever his expertise in bread-and-butter legislative issues, is an
execrably bad spokesman for gay rights, reconfirming every prejudice against
gay men?
We do not need PC ideologues like Frank -- or his officious sister, the
Democratic Party operative and former Ms. columnist Ann Lewis, currently
Sycophant-in-Chief of White House Communications -- in charge of our sex lives.
(Note how rarely the liberal media ever mentions that very telling family connection.) Despite his populist posturing,
Frank is a classic, mushy Harvard liberal (Harvard University, B.A., '62;
J.D., '77).
N E X T_P A G E | The grisly undercurrents of gay life
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